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Decline in Standards

I know, I know – two posts in two days, but this has been on my mind for a while now…

I am getting really rather frustrated at the decline in standards as regards the written word. I don’t only mean online, although that is by far the biggest culprit. I also am seeing more and more typos, bad grammar and just plain bad English in all sorts of places in the real world too.
I suppose I could be called a Grammar Nazi, in that I much prefer to see the language used properly. There are a few favourites(!) that always get my hackles up – “Loose” does not mean “unable to find”,”off” means “not on”, not “pertaining to”, and of course the age-old “They’re, There, Their” conundrum, but I am seeing more and more new ones appearing on the scene recently.

For example, I have seen a few examples recently of people writing something along the lines of “he told me how good of a job I was doing”. The word “of” is completely redundant here, but it has appeared in print a number of times recently. In the real world, in things like newspapers. You know, the things written by people whose JOB it is to use the language properly?
Another one I have an issue with is something I have only very recently come across, mainly due to being on holiday and therefore able to access the delight that is daytime television, a genre that appears to be populated by a large number of ill-educated people from the UK and the USA, mainly in some sort of TV courtroom, or having an aggressive presenter shouting at them for having loose morals or for their poor parenting skills. Anyway, I have heard a number of these people say that they “axed” someone something, when they really mean “asked”. I mean, that is even harder to say, so you can’t call that laziness!

The last one I am seeing more and more recently, is the use of an apostrophe to try to indicate a plural. In the run up to Christmas, I saw honestly saw a sign in a supermarket advertising “50% of Brussel Sprout’s”. And this wasn’t a hastily hand-written sign, it was a printed piece of cardboard, which probably meant that it had been proof-read!